FAMILY COLUMN: ‘I’m a mumsy mum - and proud of it’.

Emma Hakier

Flicking through photos in preparation for our son’s third birthday this week, I was beaming.

Snap-happy is my middle name, so we have thousands that capture everything from firsts, to comedy moments, cute expressions, family occasions and little bits of mischief.

Go columnist Emma Hakier with her two children, Issac and Jessica.

But one reduced me to tears. A picture that captured what nearly became one of our final moments together, and one that makes me want to scream at the ‘unmumsy mum’ brigade.

Jessica was two, and Isaac just 11 days old when the photo was taken on a sunny day at LothertonHall near Leeds.

I was ill at the time, but brushed it off as being tired from over-doing things in the days following 10lb Isaac’s tricky birth - nothing was going to spoil our first proper day out as afamily of four. Unusually, while we were picnicking, my hubby grabbed the camera and started taking photos of the children and I (as with most families, mummy takes most of the pictures). Little did we know, that hours later, I would be rushed to hospital and diagnosed with an illness that kills 47,000 people a year in the UK – Sepsis. Had he and my parents let me persuade them that I didn’t need to go to hospital that evening, or had A&E staff not immediately suspected sepsis when we arrived, my beautiful babies would have grown up without a mummy, and their doting daddy would have been widowed at 41. Needless to say, when the terrifying truth of how close I’d come to having my life snatched away by an illness I’d never heard of, began to emerge in the two weeks of intensive treatment that followed, it was a huge wake-up call.

I definitely don’t take life for granted, and I cherish every second with my loved ones - even more than I did before. So where do ‘unmumsy mums’ come into this? In the three years since my battle with sepsis, which is thought to have been caused by a procedure carried out during Isaac’s delivery, there has been a growing trend for mums to moan about every aspect of motherhood.

I don’t profess to be theperfect mummy, but I cannot relate to this at all.Don’t get me wrong, some of these blogs are light-hearted and funny, and I get that they create a sense of camaraderie among those who find parenting harder than others, but some of these women take their moaning to such extremes, that you wonder why they ever bothered having kids in the first place.

Recently, one made it sound like swearing at toddlers behind their backs was normal parental behaviour – there were hundreds of comments from people who said they do it regularly … I don’t get it. All parents have days where they feel wine is ‘needed’, or where a lie-in would be nice, but the giggly, snuggly, cheeky, playful times make it all worth it.

How can mums moan, when there are people who would do anything to be blessed with children, and others who are praying for a miracle to keep theirs alive? I wouldn’t want to miss a second of being a mummy, and I thank my lucky stars daily, that I don’t have to. Every moment is precious - I am a ‘mumsy mum’ and proud.